


Burning up a fever

by FalseConfidence



Series: Love & other drugs [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Andy is done with this century, M/M, Sexual Tension, fuck and die, reverse sex pollen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:09:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26021698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FalseConfidence/pseuds/FalseConfidence
Summary: “Neither of you can orgasm.” Nile blurts out and instantly cringes because it feels like she’s just sworn in front of a parent.Joe’s eyes go wide.“I hate the twenty-first century.” Andy says grimly.Watching the pair stare at each other mournfully, Nile agrees.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Love & other drugs [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1889050
Comments: 72
Kudos: 615





	Burning up a fever

**Author's Note:**

> Or where a friend and I discussed what would happen if you did an Uno reverse on the sex pollen trope and then applied it to the loveliest, most secure relationship of any film we've watched in years.

“Listen for it.” Nicky says.

“No, she should be _feeling_ it.” Andy chides.

Nile thinks that they should both shut up and leave her to sweat while she tries to pick this damn lock. Joe’s crouched down next to her, probably intending to be a reassuring presence, but honestly Nile would be better off if they all stepped back and left her alone.

“Shit.” Distracted by the pair talking she feels the tumbler drop again and focuses on trying to lift the mechanism once more.

It’s hard to believe they’re in the middle of a terrorist compound, the group not long departed very likely to be the ones they’ve been tracking for the last three weeks. If there’s one thing that Nile has learnt in her, admittedly, short time as one of the Immortals it’s that Copley has so far been scrupulous with the information he’s provided them.

And it’s on his good authority that those pesky fucking blood vials they’ve been chasing all the way from Merrick’s tower have ended up at some time in the last seven days in this very building.

The lock finally turns with a satisfyingly smooth click.

“Well done.” Joe smiles down at her.

They split up once inside, Andy sweeping the bottom floor with her while Nicky and Joe take the middle, an unspoken agreement to search the laboratory together. Nile has grown to enjoy working with Andy like this, watching her long legs stride out as they check each dark room and come up empty.

Nile knows that it would kill with the whole murder queen vibes, but would it kill them if she used a flashlight.

“Anything?” Nicky says as they congregate upstairs.

Andy shakes her head. “Nothing. You both good?”

“Aside from clearing up Booker’s mess?” Joe snipes.

It’s strange to hear it from him, any sort of ill-natured remark at odds with the mid-summer sunshine she’s grown to expect from him.

“Focus.” Andy reminds him, though it seems in Nile’s good opinion that the worst she’s going to encounter here is a particularly fearsome dust ball.

“I don’t think we’re going to find anything.” She whispers as they double back down one corridor, Nicky and Joe seamlessly weaving around one another until she’s hard-pressed to differentiate where one begins and the other ends in the murky light.

“I’d rather be safe than sorry.” Joe mutters, sword shifting as he swings around the corner to check the empty stairwell.

Do they really need swords for such close quarters?

The answer comes a split second later as glass shatters from the window to their left and she feels a bullet tear through her abdomen and fly out of the other side, the impact great enough that she thinks it must have been from a high calibre rifle as she flies backwards.

Though mostly her thoughts are a mixture of _shit, shit, shit._

Because seriously, getting shot at _hurts_.

Where she was earlier bemoaning the swords, Nile now wishes to retract her observation when the wide arc Nicky cuts through the air decapitates the mercenary that swings in through the window and seems intent of firing another round into her gaping face.

“Come on,” the blonde pulls her to her feet, shoving her away from the bank of windows as people flood into the building. She’s unsteady as her body knits itself back together, muscle and skin weaving over exposed flesh to stopper her blood leaking down her belly.

Ripped apart and remade in front of her very eyes she marvels for a very human second, and then gets drawn in by the heave of battle as everything speeds back up with a vengeance.

Andy rolls over the bodies piling up around them and crashes into Nile just in time to flatten her to the ground as a volley of machine gun fire kicks up again. The momentum carries them to the side, slams them through the door of an old storage cupboard and that more than anything else is what covers them as something ignites with a _boom_ where they were just standing.

Now, knowing that your friends are immortal and have probably died in more fascinating and intricate ways than Nile has had warm dinners is one thing, but desperately squinting through the smoke and stumbling to her feet to try and find them around the vice clutching her heart are another.

She leaves Andy to detonate without any remorse for the idiots racing towards them.

Nicky is leant over Joe when she finds them, and Nile’s blood turns to ice water, until she sees him running a knuckle over Joe’s cheekbone, tracing the edge of his jaw while the blonde murmurs something infinitely soft and delicate if the way Joe blinks sluggishly up at him is any indication.

Like they’re not still in the middle of a conflict, Nile thinks as she swings around and…

Sees the impromptu morgue Andy has crafted for them.

Sometimes the gravity of her new life crashes down with a shocking weight, the vast infinity of it all as she stands surrounded by the rapidly cooling bodies of at least two-dozen men sent to kill not her in particular but all of them as a whole.

“Why are you blue Nicky?”

Nile looks back at them both, properly this time, without the tinted filter of fear.

“Shit.” Andy says.

“It can’t be that bad.” Nile says, even though she can still see the iridescent shine over their bodies, clothes shifting with a sapphire sheen when Joe sneezes. “I mean- “

At her feet one of their attackers starts coughing out a hacksaw laugh just before he puts a bullet through her thigh.

“Oh, you fucker.” Nile says, the foot of her good leg swinging back and connecting with a satisfying crunch in the guy’s face.

“Anyone else want a go?” She asks the hallway as she hobbles towards the lab because where else is she going to find any answers, and when greeted by silence, grins lopsidedly. “Yeah, that’s what I thought!”

\---

“So,” Andy says, pacing with the air of someone that’s not used to waiting around for something as inconvenient as science, “any idea of what we’re dealing with?”

“Surprisingly, yes.” Copley says, still squinting into a microscope and trying to act the part like he’s thoroughly at ease with the quartet invading his home with a flurry of questions and demands.

“And?” Joe prompts.

“The good thing is that you’re not going to die.”

Nicky doesn’t roll his eyes, but it seems close, “That’s a relief. I was hoping to go the morning without bleeding out.”

“I do like that shirt on you.” Joe agrees.

Copley still isn’t looking at any of them, which seems if not ominous then at the very least concerning.

“So? What’s the verdict?” Andy says.

“I’d appreciate if you would all remember that I am in no way a biochemist, nor do I have a comprehensive knowledge of these things. In fact if it weren’t for the research notes that Nile found then I wouldn’t be able to even hazard a guess-”

“Please, get to the point.”

“It seems that the mist released from the explosive that sprayed you both was a particularly potent form of a drug developed with the aim of preventing procreation.”

“They sterilised Joe.” Nicky gasps, a hand clutching his lover’s shoulder and Nile can’t help but find it sweet that he’s capable of such outrage for the other without including himself in the equation.

Andy frowns. “Shouldn’t their bodies have neutralised it by now?”

Copley, who very much appears like he knows that he’s about to deliver bad news to two immortal warriors that could cut him open with a plastic spoon, says, “You would think so, but from what I can tell, these terrorists gathered what they needed from Merrick’s team and developed this drug with the intention that it stay in their systems for a long time. Worse, possibly if it was created with their DNA like I believe, although I don’t think neither you or Nile should have to worry.”

“How long?” Niles says.

“I can’t be sure, but I don’t think that it would be stretching it to hypothesise that it could remain indefinitely.”

Nicky’s hand tightens until Nile can see his knuckles pressing starkly against the pale of his skin.

“Alright, well they can’t have children.” Andy breathes out around a relieved smile. “It could be a lot worse.”

“Well,” Copley hesitates, and continues when he finds himself under the scrutiny of four very focused immortals, “that’s the goal of the drug, not the trigger so to speak.”

Andy seems to work it out the fastest, whether its her intelligence, or after a certain age you just expect the worst kind of bullshit from people. “It’s not that they’ve been sterilised, it’s just that they can’t procreate.”

Nile get’s it second. “Aw, shit.”

Joe looks between them bewildered. “What?”

“Until I find a team that can effectively and confidently reverse-engineer the drug…”

“Neither of you can orgasm.” Nile blurts out and instantly cringes because it feels like she’s just sworn in front of a parent.

Joe’s eyes go wide.

“I hate the twenty-first century.” Andy says grimly.

Watching the pair stare at each other mournfully, Nile agrees.

\---

“Surely it’s not that bad.” Nile tries to go for a firm but reassuring stance as they swing onto the motorway. “After all of these years, you must be able to resist each other for a month.”

Joe groans.

“Maybe two.” Andy points out as she pushes the car over a hundred. “Copley did say it might take two.”

Nicky swears under his breath in Italian, Russian, and Nile thinks she detects a few choice French words in there to complete the trifecta.

She wonders if he learnt them from Booker, but knows better than to add to the misery in the small vehicle by asking.

“Do you actually think that it could kill them?” Nile whispers to Andy while the pair in the backseat grumble about various murderous pursuits.

“No.” Andy says confidently.

“But you’re not willing to bet their lives on it.”

“Also no.”

\---

The first thing Andy does, when they barge into another of the numerous safe-houses she seems to have set up around the country – this one a delightful cottage near the East Devon coastline – is to print out a couple of copies of the documents found in the compound.

“This isn’t going to be pleasant.” Andy warns her. “The things that they put in here aren’t your usual horror tales.”

“Good, I hate Stephen King books.” She takes the hefty stack of papers handed to her.

They read the terrorist cells thousand page manifesto, which artfully blends the lines between disturbingly racist and homophobic, while ending with a general dose of misanthropy that has even Andy impressed with its pessimism.

Nile can’t remember the last time she had this much fun.

“Can you believe the Nubian devil is going to reign hellfire on the world?” She asks them gleefully.

Turns out that years of faking it through high school, last minute binging of required texts the night before finals, have left her far more equipped for skim reading shit.

“It isn’t funny Nile.” Andy chastises as she flicks through the pages in disgust.

“Kind of is though.” Nile says. “You can’t tell me that it isn’t amazing they can hate everything _other_ so much but then say that we’re higher in the caste system than they are.”

“The caste system they created in their heads.” Andy corrects, although from the quirk of her mouth Nile thinks that she understands.

“I’m only saying that it’s funny a bunch of racists think that I’m clearly superior to them.”

Nicky coughs and it seriously sounds like he’s suppressing laughter.

“Just wait until you get to the delicious section on how good Christian men are being led away by those pesky hedonistic Europeans.”

“It doesn’t!” Joe looks delighted as he goes from carefully examining each sentence and flips to the page Nile points out. “ _Oh_ , how wonderful.”

Andy rolls her eyes.

\---

The first few weeks all seems well, while they wait for Copley to work out where their new friends are hiding, Nile continues training in things that she never thought would be useful.

Andy has been running her through drills since the beginning. Runs that have the air ricocheting through her lungs with each ragged breath, making her practice with weapons centuries old just to form the calluses each might require when her life is on the line.

Which is a thing, how the hell can she heal from hurtling herself off of a high story building’s penthouse and yet slowly build up the required muscles to back-flip from a moving car? Admittedly the cars going around the pace of a particularly adventurous senior with a busted hip, it’s beside the point.

But Nile can feel the improvements every day, the burn in her thighs as she settles into her stance as they spar, the satisfaction the first time she escapes from the choke-hold Andy has her in, how she adapts from trying to out-punch the taller woman and starts to develop her own style, blending the scraps she’s accumulating and forging them into something that works for her narrow stature.

It’s _fun_.

Nile might have forgotten what that word is over the years.

Nicky, on the other hand, teaches her some of the _finer_ things in life. Things that she had no money for, or the patience to try as a kid, but now with eternity staring down the barrel at her, it seems a good time to branch out.

Plus it has the added bonus of distracting Nicky from his wallowing even when the man denies fervently that he’s doing so.

So she starts to learn Italian (with the slight reservation that she doesn’t want to hear a single thing Joe says that has Nicky blushing like he does), she takes up archery, she takes up _mounted_ archery because apparently that’s where the excitement is. Thanks to Nicky, Nile now knows what she looks like in polo shirts and fitted breeches.

A dick. That’s what she looks like.

But they have fun together. Nicky has more patience in his little finger than Nile has in her entire body, and every time that she misses the shot, stumbles over the correct verb and straight up butchers the nouns, Nicky is infinitely patient and wise with how he gently corrects her.

On the quiet nights that drag particularly long when one of you is a newly enlisted immortal and the other two are trying to avoid death by dicking (she can't help herself for that one, just once, she's letting herself have it _once_ ), they watch period dramas and high budget fantasies.

It starts off with going through the most popular, Game of thrones, Black Sails, Vikings, (Joe has a particular fondness for Outlander they find out later), and Nile learns what a snob Nicky is for the details. They’ve ended more than one session listening to him snipe and pick at every inaccuracy as if it’s dealt him a personal slight.

Though none of them compare to Andy’s indignant outbursts whenever she walks past - not properly joining them because she’s too cool for that – and catches sight of a scene she dubs unrealistic.

“He would not have faced six opponents that skilled without sustaining a life-threatening injury.” She says one night, daiquiri in hand, and totally leaning over the back of the couch behind them to watch.

“ _Excuse me_ ,” Nile tilts her head back, “do we need to talk about the church?”

Andy sniffs, takes a long drawn sip of her drink, and saunters away.

\---

The first time Nile realises there’s tiny little fissures forming in Joe and Nicky’s restraint, is while they’re in the middle of another gun fight.

Nile is sliding between crates when she sees Nicky go down in the middle of covering Joe where the latter is still trying to recover from the holes riddled in his side.

This time Nile is the one that loses it, barely notices as she cleaves a path directly to them, breaks necks like wish bones between her fingers, spins the knives from her belt like shooting stars as they land with sickening thuds in the soft, exposed slivers of skin between body armour and headgear until there’s nothing left but the three of them.

Through swimming vision Nile sees Nicky lying on the floor, crimson haloed around his head, she groans around a mouthful of blood that tastes like old pennies. By the time she staggers over she’s knows that her nose is broken and her shoulder is almost certainly dislocated.

Neither matters as she watches Joe carding his fingers through Nicky’s hair, cups a hand against his cheek and Nile thinks she can hear the air wheezing out of Joe’s deflated lung as it tries to heal itself around it’s owners insistence of holding his breath until after a terrifying _eleven seconds_ Nicky lurches upright with a gasp.

Maybe she’s developing a hair-trigger reaction towards seeing her newly minted family lying in pools of their own blood, but Nile understands now, why Joe coils around Nicky the entire flight home. Possessively petting through his tacky and wet hair, the entire line of his body pressed against Nicky’s while the blonde has his eyes shut resting.

Andy’s waiting for them when they finally stumble back across the threshold hours later. “What happened to teaching Nile reconnaissance?”

Joe tries to take the brunt of the blame all while shooing Nicky away and Nile admires it, if not that she’s equally at fault, if not more so because she was the one that fired first. So the two of them argue it out while Andy overlooks with a wry amusement, not deigning to interrupt except to utter various iterations of _idiots_.

“It could be worse.” Nile says.

“How so?”

“I’m not sure yet, give me a minute to think of something decent.”

Andy laughs, drifts towards the liquor trolley and passes her a glass filled to the brim with whiskey and Nile takes because it would be rude not to.

Nicky comes down the stairs, hair damp and fluffy from his shower, and he pauses looking a little bit lost as Joe slips past him.

“What’s wrong?” Nile whispers to Andy as Nicky disappears into the library.

Andy pauses in the middle of pouring another drink. She looks, for the first time, incredibly sad. “They usually bathe together after a death. It’s a life-affirming thing between them.”

“Then why aren’t they…”

Andy raises a brow.

“Wow.” Nile sighs and tries to think about how it must feel to be in a constant state of duality, split open and fragile without the other, soft like a Faberge egg filled with declarations of love and heart-ache.

Joe trundles down shortly after, and there’s a fading glow about him, as if he’s running at half-power without the spark in his life that charges him.

Nile is starting to feel bad for them.

\---

Then it’s just strange little moments.

One morning, after Nile returns from a run where her lungs are heaving and there’s a sting as sweat drips down her face, she finds Joe sitting in the kitchen, hunched over the island.

“Are you drinking coffee?” She asks disbelievingly, stretches up to grab one of the bottled waters Nicky always keeps well stocked in the refrigerator for her.

“I have resigned myself to it.”

“Why?”

“How else would I stay awake at this unpleasant hour?”

“Or you could go back to bed.”

“Or I could die.” Joe mutters darkly.

Nile looks at him, thinks about it, and then decides to refill his nearly empty mug.

\---

Nicky has taken to predawn meditation.

He’s out on the balcony while they spend a month in the Maldives, starts with a series of stretches that Nile, having never been to Yoga a day in her life, suspects are dreadfully hard forms.

She isn’t that bias towards her own preference to be blind to the beauty in the arch of his pretty body.

“Does it help?” She asks curiously, leans forward over the railing to admire the sinew and muscle play under his skin.

“A little.” Nicky says.

“No.” Joe groans next to her, coffee spilling over the edge of his mug and drenching his hand as a thin strip of Nicky’s stomach is exposed when he stretches out.

\---

The strangest one so far is when she finds herself near sleepwalking down the stairs, drawn by the irresistible scent of cardamom and heated sugar.

“Are you alright Nile?” Nicky raises his head when she stumbles into the kitchen, rubbing her blurry eyes until she makes out the clock on the wall and cringes at the time.

“I feel like I should be asking you that.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

Nile takes in the uneasy manner with which Nicky is carrying himself, the clench of his jaw as he breathes deliberately slowly, and thinks _fair enough_.

“Don’t interrupt him while he’s baking.” Andy’s disembodied voice almost sends Nile sprawling until the woman slowly materialises from the corner of the room.

Nicky scowls at her. “I’m glad that my torment is pleasing to you.”

“It is,” Andy smiles as she perches on a stool, “now give me my baklava.”

Upon seeing the treats laid out on the baking tray Nile promptly sits down.

\---

This is Andy at her sadistic best, Nile decides.

There’s no other excuse for imposing this on the suffering pair.

“They’re professionals Nile.” Andy reiterates, effusing the words with an exasperated air.

“It’s been three months.”

“You do realise that they used to go years without seeing one another?”

Sure she knows that, but since she’s been a part of their lives she can’t recall more than a few hours without seeing one in the shadow of the other.

“Are they at least _really_ bad?”

“Organ traffickers.”

It doesn’t seem sufficient but Joe thinks it is, and therefore Nicky does as well.

So that’s how Nile finds herself standing in a ballroom with four-hundred strangers (who honestly knows that many people in real life?) trying to understand how any of these rich bastards can look at her and possibly think that she’s here to sing later.

“I hate this dress.”

“You look beautiful.” Joe says as he passes to collect another drink, resplendent in a three-piece suit that, upon seeing earlier, had sent poor Nicky stomping out of the room scowling furiously. “Green is your colour.”

The dress in question is tight at the waist, long enough it swirls around her ankles and the heels she’s only agreed to because she’s always been curious to see whether she can test her theory that they might be used to impale someone with.

Frustratingly, Nile knows that she looks sublime.

Therefore there’s no real reason to complain other than the perverse old men admiring her as she walks around the room, waiting to spot her mark, scanning individuals in the carefully constructed social rings of the upper echelons of society.

If this is what money does to people, Nile thinks, then she’s glad that her family barely had two cents to rub together on a good day.

She shifts to accept a drink from a passing waiter, rolls the stem of the flute between her fingertips because why else do people put themselves through the torture of a wedding unless it’s to get wasted on booze or bridesmaids. Preferably both. She’s trying to abstain from the bridesmaids out of a twisted solidarity with her friends… and, well, the fact that half of them might be in on the organ ring and Nile will never be that desperate she hopes.

Therefore the open bar is going to be plundered to the very best of Nile Freeman’s very capable body while she’s forced into this hellhole.

She’s in the middle of dodging a congressman perspiring excessively, sweat beading above his brow, reddened cheeks swelling in the warm air, as the man tries to rally her onto the dance floor, when she catches a glimpse of the Joe leading Nicky to the centre of the crowd.

Of course they can’t resist, not when the Bride’s sister is already there, swaying back and forth with her own partner, and Nile wonders if they too, feel the need to take advantage of every little pocket of safety there is in the world for people like them.

It leads to other questions that she’d like to be able to ask them someday. To understand the life they’ve led and they way they’ve managed to spend a millenia so desperately in love without it weathering like iron in a perpetual monsoon, slowly turning to rust and eroding until the foundations crumble and they’ve nothing left.

She tries to see a flaw as they move together seamlessly, lifetime after lifetime of combat, of moving in synchronicity on the battlefield manifesting itself into the easy push-and-pull nature between them. Nile smiles as they occasionally fumble a step whenever it seems that people are drawn too long into watching their effortless glide around the dance floor.

Joe mutters something into the shell of Nicky’s ear as a new song begins, the latter turning a fetching shade of red before pulling away and stalking off of the floor.

“What was that about?” She can’t help but ask curiously as Joe strides over and plucks the glass she offers him before tipping it back.

“All I did was ask him if he was amenable to a twirl.” Joe very clearly lies to her.

“You’re a very horrible man.” Nile grins and accepts the hand he offers to her.

“You know,” she says as Joe treats her to a twirl instead, lets her spin out with momentum before reeling her back in, “it might be easier if you both stayed away from one another for a while.”

Joe looks down at her like she’s just uttered the filthiest thing he’s ever heard, and clearly not in a way that he’d prefer. “Absolutely not.”

“Not even tempted?”

“It’s the worst idea I’ve heard anyone suggest in the last century.”

“Really?” Because she’s only been alive for a small fraction of it and she’s heard some stupid shit.

“His absence is non-negotiable.”

“Fair.”

They circle the floor for a few lazy rotations, milling in and out of various couples until she spots Nicky with about three fingers worth of whiskey in a glass, very deliberately staring at the ceiling whenever they pass as if Nile can’t see the remnants of a blush settled high on his cheekbones.

“How do you manage it?”

“Hm.” Joe pauses in his blatant ogling of his lover. “Manage what?”

“This. The both of you. How do you stay in love after all of this time? Don’t you ever get bored?”

“I wouldn’t know how to be.” Joe confesses.

Nile almost calls him out on that one because it’s not really an answer as much as it seems the truth, when she catches sight of Nicky disappearing through the fire exit at the far end of the banquet hall. “Lets go.”

Now, considering all that she’s seen so far, if Nile were to hazard a guess at who might be the more frustrated out of the pair, she would feel safe putting her money on Joe.

But by the end of the night, when they’re finished taking out a multi-million dollar ring of criminals, Nile would like her earlier thoughts on the matter to be stricken from the record.

Because nobody should be able to move like Nicky does, a tempest in motion, dress shirt sleeves rolled up above his elbows, traversing the space between each trafficker to the beat of Nile’s racing heart and dropping them with a flick of the wrist.

Joe wipes the blood from his husbands cheeks, when all is said and done, with reverent hands, kisses the crown of Nicky's head and Nile takes that as her cue to get the fuck out of there.

“I wouldn’t mind,” she later whines to Andy, “but I didn’t even get to club anyone with my shoe.”

\---

Andy bursts into her room not long after midnight.

Nile, who’s always been a light sleeper, hits the bedside lights, knife palmed in her hand until she sees who it is and collapses back with a groan, tucking the blade between her bed and the wall.

“We need to go.” Andy says.

With the knowledge that it’s not an emergency because Andy isn’t wearing a cape of blood like it’s this seasons latest fashion, Nile sits up slowly and watches bemused as Andy starts grabbing her clothes out of the wardrobe and throws them in a sports bag.

“Why?” Nile stretches, grateful that she’s developed a habit of sleeping fully dressed since she’s joined them.

“It’s always the bloody M’s.” Andy hisses to herself. There’s a slightly demented look in her eye that Nile can’t help but admire.

“What do you-“

“Malta, the Maldives, if they fuck up Mexico for me…” Andy trails off.

Nile goes to ask as she trots after the taller woman, then spots the opened envelope on the hallway table, next to a cooler bag that looks much like the one she’s seen in medical dramas, and more recently at a socialite wedding, for transplanting organs. Catches sight of Copley’s letterhead, the bold lines of his signature...

“Oh.” Nile says. Then, “ _Oooooooh_.” Then, “How long until the antidote takes effect?”

“Not long enough.” Andy storms out of the house like a thunderclap.

“I was meant to go snorkelling with Nicky in the morning.” Nile laments.

“If you want to stay here, then be my guest.” Andy chucks their bags into the speedboat and all but throws herself behind the wheel. “Unless you value your sanity, then I would suggest getting in the boat and coming with me to get payback on the bastards that did this.”

It’s the closest thing in real life that Nile will ever get to a _come with me if you want to live_ moment, and she can’t imagine the newly mortal woman would find that nearly as funny as she does, so with a fond little wave at the currently still standing villa, Nile vaults into the boat and says her goodbyes to the Maldives for what's probably going to be a long time if the scrunched up look on Andy's face has anything to do with it.

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly I'm so tempted to do a proper part 2 to this, because I'll never have enough of pining Joe and Nicky :)


End file.
